Yesterday, the National Labor Relations Board’s Acting General Counsel, Anne Purcell released a report detailing the outcome of investigations into 14 cases involving the use of social media and employers’ social media policies.
The report provides useful guidelines for practitioners and human resource professionals in dealing with employee use of social media as well as drafting social media policies for employee handbooks.
Each case was submitted by regional offices to the NLRB’s Division of Advice in Washington, DC. In four cases involving employees’ use of Facebook, the Division found that the employees were engaged in “protected concerted activity” because they were discussing terms and conditions of employment with fellow employees. In five other cases involving Facebook or Twitter posts, the Division found that the activity was not protected.
In one case, it was determined that a union engaged in unlawful coercive conduct when it videotaped interviews with employees at a nonunion jobsite about their immigration status and posted an edited version on YouTube and the Local Union’s Facebook page.
In five cases, some provisions of employers’ social media policies were found to be unlawfully overly-broad. A final case involved an employer’s lawful policy restricting its employees’ contact with the media.
Join us this fall, as a representative from the NLRB will be speaking on this issue at the HR & Employer Compliance Summit 15-17, 2011 in San Diego, CA.
Kara Mignanelli
Ms. Mignanelli serves as Senior Vice President of People and General Counsel. In her role, Ms. Mignanelli oversees numerous aspects of the business, including, but not limited to, HR compliance and keeping a pulse on the most current regulations and compliance requirements affecting corporations as well as working to ensure quality and professionalism in all aspects of the business.
Ms. Mignanelli has cross-functional experience in multiple areas including litigation, compliance, social media, privacy, employment law, intellectual property, estate planning, corporate formation, and risk management. She is responsible for all aspects of the company's legal needs and all HR.
Ms. Mignanelli also created the Governance, Risk Management and Compliance summit in 2009 and more recently the HR Compliance and Social Recruiting Strategies Conferences.
Prior to joining GSMI, Ms. Mignanelli was the managing associate at Boyd Contreras LLP. Her practice focused primarily on civil litigation involving business disputes. Ms. Mignanelli's litigation experience includes business litigation, partnership and contract disputes, personal injury, labor and employment law, trade secrets misappropriation, and legal malpractice.
She also maintains a solo practice offering transactional legal services including estate planning, probate, family law and corporate formation.
Before practicing law, Ms. Mignanelli was Director of the Social Policy Center at the Performance Institute where she managed conference production staff and successfully executed over 30 conference and training events, accounting for the largest profit generating center of the company.
